From My Grandmother's Bedside: Sketches of Postwar Tokyo Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

From My Grandmother's Bedside: Sketches of Postwar Tokyo Book

Japan is not what you would call a direct culture. Refined through centuries of close living, honed over the years to a subtle edge, Japanese communication tends toward the gentle allusion and the discreet sign as opposed to the blunt, brash, in-your-face openness that often characterizes American interchanges. So it's appropriate that Norma Field's portrait of postwar Japan emerges indirectly from her personal tale of family duty. It's the summer of 1995, and Norma Field, the product of a Japanese mother and occupation GI father, has returned to Japan to care for her grandmother, who has suffered her second stroke. As Field concentrates on learning to read the signals of her grandmother's stroke-impaired face--the almost imperceptible difference between the nod "yes" and the nod "no"--she digresses in a series of short vignettes. Field reminisces about her childhood (taking loyalty oaths in the American Embassy, sharing the warm futon with her aunts and grandmother in the Eight-Mat Room), ponders death with dignity versus putting feeding tubes up her grandmother's nose, sees anew the photography of Domon Ken in an exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, and observes visiting American businessmen misunderstanding Japanese hospitality. Neatly compartmentalized like a lacquered bento box lunch, the whole is much more than a sum of the beautifully crafted parts. Thoughtful and moving, Field's untraditional memoir provides insights into both American and Japanese histories and cultures. Delve into her observations on the long flight to Narita and your whole visit will be enhanced by Field's appreciation of the personal Japan that lies beneath the surface.Read More

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  • Product Description

    From My Grandmother's Bedside is an experiment in genre, a moving and evocative reflection on contemporary Japan, human desire, family relations, life, and death. Norma Field, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an American G.I., and author of the acclaimed In the Realm of a Dying Emperor, returned to Japan in 1995 to tend to her slowly dying grandmother, who had been rendered speechless by multiple strokes. What she findsboth in the memories of her childhood in her grandmother's household and in the altered face of postmodern Japanforms the substance of her narrative that transcends both memoir and essay to reveal, through crafted fragments, a refraction of the whole of Japan. Having spent her childhood in Japan and her adulthood in the United States, Field speaks from the position of one who straddles two worlds. Her testimony is highly personal, her voice is intimate, her observations are keen and clear. She juxtaposes details from daily lifeconversations overheard on the subway; arguments between her mother and aunts; the struggle to feed, bathe, and care for her grandmotherwith observations on the political and social changes that have transformed Japan. She shows how the belated coming to terms with the war and continuing avoidance of the same are intimately related to the look and feel of Japanese society today. She gently folds back the complicated layers of blame and responsibility for the war, touching in the process on subjects as diverse as the effects of the atomic bomb, comfort women, biracial/bicultural families, the farewells of Kamikaze pilots, and the dehumanizing effects of Japan's postwar economic boom. A recurrent theme is the observation of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. From My Grandmother's Bedside is also a contemplation of the many facets of language: the kinds of language with which her grandmother's illness has been negotiated, the wordless language her grandmother speaks, her own relationship to these languages. Through it all runs the realization that the personal and the political are perpetually entangled, that past and present converge and overlap.

  • 0520208447
  • 9780520208445
  • Norma Field
  • 28 November 1997
  • University of California Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 204
  • illustrated edition
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